Dear People of St. James’,
Before my ordination to the priesthood, God willing, on January 17, I wanted to update you on the last three-and-a-half years working with you all as part of the Proyecto Santiago Missional Community.
Back in March 2016, when the parish budget was tight, it looked as if there would be no one available to help with the Spanish 1:00pm service. Then one of those twists of Providence brought things together. I had just been accepted in the Iona bi-vocational program to study for the priesthood, and Bishop Dena Harrison suggested that the 1:00pm congregation should become a missional community and I should help direct and coordinate it. I was commissioned as a missioner at the 10:15 service on April 3, 2016; it was the Sunday we commemorated César Chávez.
This call was a dream come true because it meant that I would stay attached to St. James’, where I had arrived twelve years earlier. As a rule, people in the Iona program must leave and not return to the church community to which they had belonged. All my colleagues, now that they are deacons or about to be priests, are assigned to new locations; and that was also true of their Iona internships prior to ordination. The diocese recognized the need for Proyecto Santiago and allowed me stay here and will let me stay here after ordination.
Part of the bi-vocational track is that we are never eligible to be rectors or vicars, and we are non-stipendiary since the idea of “bi-vocational” is that Iona graduates have regular jobs or, like me, are retired. We also have a limited work week imposed on us, although that is probably better kept on paper than in reality. The aim is to provide part-time clergy for small parishes that cannot afford a salary for regular clergy.
Working with Proyecto Santiago at St. James’ has been a great journey; and I look forward to spending however many more years that I am allotted on the planet doing this same work. I will continue with Proyecto and with the larger St. James’ congregation.
Proyecto has been very fortunate to have several clergy volunteers celebrate the Eucharist on Sundays: Fr. Al Rodríguez, Michael Floyd, Jay Alanís, Carlos Anderson, and Fr. Carlos Plazas, and The Rev. Madeline Shelton Hawley. They also have been mentors to me.
One goal of Proyecto is to connect the work of the larger congregation with Proyecto and vice versa. We have done this to some extent with the successful drive to keep Norman Elementary open, the Reading Buddies program, Ashes-to-Go on Ash Wednesday, legal workshops for immigrants, and, of course, the annual tamalada.
There’s much more to do. The idea of a missional community is to take the church to the neighborhood, with one objective being to organize house meetings and worship. We’re just barely beginning that work. Our specific focus is on our Latino neighbors.
Being part of Proyecto has brought me full circle – home, as it were. As many of you know, I was in the Roman Catholic seminary for high school and college. However, the Josephinum was a very conservative institution. It ironically pushed me away from the seminary toward becoming a human rights lawyer, which for me was always Gospel work. So, in a sense, I’m back where I started and very happy about it – and very honored that you all have been such an awesome part of the journey.
As we Irish say, with a bit of paradox, it was a fortunate wind that blew me here.
The Rev. Jim Harrington
